Sunday, October 26, 2014

There are Alternatives to Current U.S. Policy in the Middle East

A few weeks ago, Gary Lee commented on a post that was critical
of Hillary Clinton, and I neglected to respond.By way of penance, and because I think it’s a conversation worth having,
I thought I’d do a post in response to his question.

Gary’s question, in relation to my grumpy assessment of Hillary
Clinton’s contribution to our foreign policy framework was, “Do you honestly
believe that if we ignore the region and allow them to fight among themselves
that the terrorists will find a new hobby and have no interest in attacking the
US?”

I’ll
spend some time unpacking the assumptions behind the question, but let me start
with the policy juxtaposition that it assumes.

It
is often the case that isolationism—seriously or disingenuously depending on
the commentator—is mooted as the only alternative to our existing policy of
terror, war, colonialism, and backing for authoritarian regimes.

I
hope that we are no so imaginatively-stunted as a nation that we can’t come up
with something that falls slightly between the two.

We
could, for example, refrain from giving carte blanche to colonial regimes like
that in Israel.That would earn us
opprobrium from the Israelis, and some goodwill from people elsewhere in the
region.It would be a just, sensible
policy, and one that would ultimately benefit Israeli citizens by forcing their
recalcitrant government to negotiate seriously with the people they are
currently ruling over.

We
could forbear from selling weapons from undemocratic regimes, whether those are
monarchies or military dictatorships.The
sale of such weapons are used against citizens when they protest for their
rights, and the existence of such regimes is one of the grievances that some
terrorist organizations have articulated in their campaigns against a U.S.
presence in the region.

Our
government expressed outrage when the Iranian government put down democratic
revolutionaries, but kept out mouths firmly shut when the Egyptian military
mounted a coup and when kleptocratic monarchies in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia
crushed protests.

We
could dismantle some or all of our military bases in the region.Put yourselves in the shoes of Middle
Easterners—whether conservative or liberal—who are faced with the indignity of
a foreign power maintaining a military presence in their country which clearly
compromises their sovereignty.That is a
behavior we would associate with an occupying empire rather than a friend and
neighbor.Our bases help to prop up
undemocratic regimes and are also a target for terrorists.

We
could refrain from using methods of barbarism and terror in the region.We broke international law by waging a war of
aggression, we tortured, abducted, disappeared, and murdered people.That is not behavior that earns us friends or
that contributes to stability in the region.

Our
easy recourse to force and our large military presence in the Middle East also
offends many people because it smacks of self-interested unilateralism.Our government—as well as those of Russia,
China, Britain, and France—sabotage the United Nations, international law, and
other international social, political, and legal fora by way of maintaining
greater clout in the international sphere.

But
that clout means that when things go wrong and it might be time for a
humanitarian intervention, those international organizations lack the
infrastructure and funding to mount such an intervention.And the U.S. forces which often step into the
breach are handicapped by a lack of expertise—our soldiers are not trained as
peacekeepers—a lack of trust—because of past behavior they are seen as imperial
aggressors—and a lack of support.

There
is also a common misconception in the United States that the Middle East is
somehow an inherently violent place, and that people just “fight among
themselves” out of habit, or because such irrational behavior is ingrained in
their character.

The
reality, of course, is that the region has for the last hundred years been
preyed upon by outsiders, hungry for territory, for oil, and for geopolitical
power.The Middle East, like other parts
of Asia and Africa, as well as Latin America, was a hot front in the Cold
War.And it has been a location where
rival powers from outside of the region projected their ideologies and
influences, whether late-Victorian imperialists, or twenty-first century neo-conservatives.

The
United States has staged coups in the region, sold arms in abundance, and
absurdly, allows much of our foreign policy in the region to be governed by a
retrograde colonial regime which pursues a punitive, self-destructive, and
immoral policy towards the people over whom it rules.That conflict—between Palestinians and
Israelis—was also engineered by early-twentieth century colonial powers.

If
we need to educate ourselves about the historical roots of conflict in the
region—and our culpability in sparking and maintaining some of those—we also
need to think about how we characterize “terrorism” and “terrorists”.Their actions are not their “hobby”.

Al
Qaeda, ISIS, and other of their ilk are pursuing recognizable, defined
political ends.Those goals might be
offensive to us, and difficult to understand.And the methods by which they are pursued might shock and horrify
us.But we accomplish nothing if we
simply dismiss them as “evildoers” and fail to understand the relationship
between our actions and their rise.Understanding something is not the same thing as condoning it, and
anyone who fails to understand the appeal that these organizations offer to the
citizens of Middle Eastern countries is doomed to fail in trying to contain or
halt them.

Some
of the leadership of these organizations clearly has an interest in attacking
the United States, although for the most part their grievances are local in
nature, and it is only our local actions which earn us their ire.The capacity of such groups to attack in the
United States is clearly highly-limited, but they have been able to exploit our
predictable aggression and draw us into attacking them on their own ground and
commit ourselves to a war that we cannot win, particularly when our own methods
of terror and barbarism win recruits and scatter terror across the region.

So
no, it’s not as easy as us going home and everything getting better.But we can make far better choices.We can support international institutions
that have moral and legal legitimacy, and equip them with the political,
military, and economic material they require to act to halt humanitarian
crises.We can draw down our provocative
military presence.We can withdraw our
support from colonial and authoritarian regimes.We can do our best to put a stop to the
criminal arms trade that enables and fuels conflict.We can forswear our own adoption of terrorism.And we can try to understand that all
conflicts have their roots in particular historical moments and events instead
of treating the Middle East as a naturally-violent part of the world.

These
actions are all consistent with the values we preach, and I think if aired in
public would command a great deal of support from a public that is living the
results of decades of failed policies.Since
our political leadership shows no interest in making these changes, here—as with
so much else—the push will have to come from a public who can show that they
care about our relations with other people in other parts of the world.

About Me

I am from Northern California, and am the fifth generation of my family to have lived in the Golden State. Now I live next-door in the Silver State, where I research and write about colonialism and decolonization in Africa, teach European, African, environmental, and colonial history, and write this blog, mostly about politics, sometimes about history, and occasionally about travels or research.